With advanced robotics becoming cheaper and more commonplace, the challenge isn’t how we learn to accept robots—but whether we should care when they’re mistreated. And if we start caring about robot ethics, might we then go one insane step further and grant them rights? Source: Wired.

Taken from a US legalistic perspective, the simple answer would be “no.” The US Constitution only refers to “persons” and robots have not (yet) fallen under that definition. It would probably take a Constitutional amendment to confer “person-hood” status to robots, but changing the Constitution is no simple feat (Art. 5 requires both passage in Congress and 3/4 of the State’s legislatures). State Constitutions operate in a similar manner, but are easier to amend depending on the state. We’re more likely to see a state recognition of robot rights before we see a federal recognition due to those relative differences.

On the other hand, the Wired article makes a really good point about how more and more children are growing up with robotic toys and, just like my generation’s change in attitudes towards technology, perhaps those young children will have a different perspective on how we should treat robots. This change is already coming, albeit slowly, in some countries. Again, from the Wired article:

In 2007, a South Korean politician declared that his country would be the first to draw up legal guidelines on how to treat robots; the UK has also looked into the area (though nothing substantial has come of it anywhere). Source: Wired.

A more philosphical observation is that perhaps these rules are not for the machines themselves, but for our humanity. A few of the comments to the article (and the article itself) argue that as robots become more lifelike and humanlike, what does that say about a person willing to torture a robot? What does that tell us about human psychology? A more practical concern is that as machines become more intelligent, we don’t want them to do the Skynet thing by mistreating them. For now, without strong AI, robots are just toys that simulate behavior. Without that, it’s nothing more than a video game. There is no self-awareness to really hurt. No self-awareness to really consider as “person.” Person-hood implies that robots contain qualities that make them a “person.” Merely simulating emotions does not seem to be the complete picture of what a “person” is.